Managing Busyness

I've concluded that if too much busyness is what drove me to regrettably stop blogging and stop reading a year ago, then perhaps I can use all the help I can get in learning how to better manage busyness.

I've been trying to glean wisdom from authors and mentors about managing busyness, and in the process, a few thoughts have surfaced in my mind:

• Busyness in itself isn't a bad thing, provided that it doesn't rule our lives. As with everything else in life, busyness needs boundaries. Healthy human beings know how to be productive and to make the most of their time, but they also know how to rest, enjoy life, be at peace, and build relationships with those they care about. They give equal importance to both busyness and stillness. They manage their busyness; their busyness doesn't manage them.
  


• We ought to be busy about the right things. Highly motivated and highly competent people, perhaps most of all, seem prone to pursue too many things at once - because they see that those things are good ideas, because they believe that no one else will do those things correctly if they themselves don't, or because they fear missing a good opportunity. But not every good idea is the right idea to pursue. Healthy human beings know how to say "no" to some good ideas in order to say "yes" to the right ideas.

An Inc.com article from yesterday offered me some good insight about this last point. Please enjoy the wisdom from this brief conversation between Inc.com writer Marla Tabaka and author Peter Bregman: "Mastering Distraction in 18 Minutes"